David Loy Interview

David R. Loy is a Buddhist philosopher who writes on the interaction between Buddhism and modernity. He has been practicing Zen since 1971 and is an authorized teacher in the Sanbo-Kyodan tradition of Japanese Zen Buddhism. David has taught at the National University of Singapore and Bunkyo University in Japan. From 2006 to 2010 he was the Besl Family Chair Professor of ethics/religion and society at Xavier University in Cincinnati.

Transcript

SZ: This question gets asked a lot, but, how did you first get started with Zen practice?

DL: In 1971 I was living in Hawaii, sometimes hanging out with a friend in Waikiki who heard about a zendo near the University called Koko An. We went there one evening and after the sitting learned that the following weekend there would be a seven day sesshin with a Japanese Zen master, Yamada Koun of the Sanbo Kyodan. There were still some openings, so my friend and I signed up – but we had no idea what a sesshin was! We expected that we’d all sit a bit and have tea with the roshi, with opportunities to talk to him about this or that. It turned out to be the most difficult seven days of my life.

During the sesshin I literally thought that I was going crazy after about the fourth day. Physically, there was a lot of pain, of course. But the biggest challenge was psychological. Because I hadn’t sat much before, I didn’t really have any perspective on all those thoughts that were bouncing off the wall, and of course during a sesshin you don’t get the reassuring feedback we usually get from other people. But after the sesshin was over and I was lying in bed at home, about to fall asleep, at that moment of letting go there was a little opening– nothing terribly dramatic but it reinforced my sense that this was the path for me.

The main teacher in Hawaii was Robert Aitken, who was just beginning to teach and at that time I felt particularly connected with Yamada-roshi. I stayed in Hawaii for several more years, later living at the Maui Zendo and then Koko-on Zendo while I studied at the University of Hawaii, but eventually, many years later, I ended up in Japan doing intensive koan study with Yamada-roshi in Kamakura.

SZ: Did you have an interview with Yamada-roshi during that first sesshin?

DL: Yes, although for the first few days newcomers had a series of introductory talks on Zen practice with Bob Aitken, as we called him at the time. It wasn’t until the last two or three days that I actually had dokusan with Yamada-roshi and started working on the Mu koan.

SZ: Now, what was it about zazen specifically that attracted you?

DL: It wasn’t only zazen but also inspiration from the example of Yamada-roshi, in particular. If Zen practice could transform me into someone like him then I was interested. I could also tell that, despite the difficulty with my thoughts bouncing around wildly, that something very valuable was happening.

SZ: Why is kensho so important within the Sanbo Kyodan tradition?

DL: That seemed pretty natural at the time. As you know, the word Buddha literally means “the awakened” and kensho – literally “seeing [into one’s true] nature” – is simply another word for the same thing. Zazen isn’t just a matter of improving one’s mental or physical health, or one’s power of concentration. The Sanbo Kyodan emphasizes that there are three goals of Zen practice – concentration power, kensho, and personalization (the transformation of one’s character). They fit together well.

SZ: There has been some criticism leveled against the Sanbo Kyodan regarding kensho, that so much emphasis on it can be problematical because it makes such openings into a thing that can be gained.

DL: In principle, at least, that focus on kensho is balanced by emphasis on personalization too, the transformation of character. It’s often been assumed that, for someone who has had a kensho, that this transformation happens by itself if one continues with the sitting practice. Now I’m less sure that’s true. Something we have learned over the last generation in the West is that one’s zazen practice can benefit from being supplemented with various types of psychotherapy. Sometimes zazen by itself isn’t enough for thorough transformation.

SZ: Some of your work discusses the encounter between Buddhism and Western psychology. You have made the point that, while many discussions of the two emphasize their similarities, each may shed light on the other. Could you expand upon that?

DL: Zazen, and Buddhist practice in general, helps us to become aware of the emptiness (shunyata) of all phenomena, including mental phenomena. We open up to the empty ground from which thoughts, memories, intentions and feelings arise. It is important, indeed necessary, to realize that thoughts, etc., are not the product of an ego-self but just the opposite: one’s sense of self is constructed by the ways that the thoughts themselves interact. The ego-self does not create thoughts, it’s a product of thought. The “mind stream” has a deeper origin. With meditation practice we become aware of this groundless ground. Awakening, kensho, is like the bottom falling out of a bucket. It’s realizing that thoughts, etc., arise from a much deeper place.

A common assumption, maybe the traditional assumption, is that just going back to that empty ground — becoming more aware “of” that shunya source from which all phenomena arise — is sufficient. Yet none of us live “there” only. Yes, all form is empty, but emptiness is always taking form. The sense of ego self needs to be reconstructed as well as deconstructed. The point is not to get rid of the self, because there never has been a self. Nor is it to get rid of all sense of self because that would result in mental disability — you could not function at all. Rather, the challenge is to realize the emptiness of that sense of self and reconstruct the self as a better vehicle for this deeper functioning.

That’s where psychotherapy can play an important role. Psychotherapy can help us understand important things about our habitual patterns and self-defeating mental tendencies, the mostly unconscious ways and places we are stuck.

SZ: Are you saying that psychotherapy has a role to play in helping us transform these patterns, or in helping us understand them better? I’m thinking of something more like cognitive behavioral therapy rather than psychotherapy, whereby we can systematically change those thoughts to produce new behaviors.

DL: I’m talking about blockages. The sense of self — in Buddhism, that’s the fundamental delusion, right? Instead of Buddhist practice being a simple matter of always letting go of the thought-patterns that arise and compose the sense of self, sometimes one can also benefit from examining and understanding problematical patterns. It may not be enough just to sit, or to just realize the empty ground from which these habitual patterns arise. Sometimes insight is needed into the knots — the mental tendencies where we are stuck. Psychotherapy can be very helpful for gaining insight into what those knots are and how they work, so that we are more open to, better able to see, alternative ways of thinking and acting.

SZ: So while there is shunyata emptiness, sometimes there’s also something else going on that we need to look at.

DL: Right. I don’t think of this as cognitive therapy, which, as I understand it, usually involves replacing one conditioned way of thinking with another.

SZ: Your works have been described by many of your colleagues as helping to reshape our Western understanding of Buddhist teachings, sometimes marking a departure from the so-called Asian party line. Is this something that you’ve intentionally set out to do?

DL: Yes, very much so. Arnold Toynbee is reputed to have said (though I haven’t been able to trace the source) that, when historians look back at the 20th century, what will stand out for them is that Buddhism came to the West. This encounter between Buddhism and modernity will change Buddhism as much as it will change the West — if it goes well, of course! In fact, such transformations are traditional to Buddhism. True to its own emphasis on impermanence and interdependence, every time Buddhism has spread to a different culture it hasn’t just imposed itself but has also been changed, sometimes radically. There is a mutual causality, which is why new forms such as Ch’an developed in China, and Tibetan Buddhism in Tibet.

Today Buddhism has begun its most radical and challenging transformation of all in its encounter with the modern West. Again, we should expect transformation on both sides, which I see as necessary because each needs the other. I lived in Japan for many years and have traveled throughout most of Buddhist Asia, and it’s obvious that Asian Buddhism is stuck in various ways. The ways Buddhism has been institutionalized, and especially the way in which karma has degenerated into merit-making, is very problematical.

On the other side, the West is encountering Buddhism not a moment too soon. We are in a time of great crisis if not collapse. The globalization of the West has created enormous problems and much of it has to do with a basic worldview that is deluded and unsustainable. So Buddhism has something very important to offer the West. At the same time, Asian Buddhism brings with it a lot of cultural baggage that doesn’t work well in the West, where it tends to get in the way of Buddhism’s liberative potential. Buddhism needs to benefit from the best that the West has to offer, and not only scientifically. There are many magical and mythic elements in Asian Buddhism that we need to let go of. So it’s an exciting encounter on both sides. We are still in the early days but it’s started.

SZ: That’s why your teacher, Yamada Koun-roshi, was so important, because he transmitted to many teachers coming from the Judeo-Christian tradition. In my opinion, one of the more important things that must happen for Buddhism to be relevant in the West is not only dialogue with Western religions but also for those religions to interpret our tradition through their own lens.

DL: I am not sure that the most important dialogue is going to be with Christianity, Judaism or Islam — the Abrahamic religions. That conversation is one of the more fruitful examples of interreligious dialogue, but the dialogue is happening in other ways too, which leads us back to the interaction between Buddhism and Western psychology. That has probably been more important so far – for example, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction program. But that’s only one example. Now there are so many therapists who are also Buddhist practitioners, some of whom have also become Buddhist teachers, like my friends Joseph Bobrow and David Weinstein in the Bay Area.

An important thing Buddhism can learn from the Abrahamic traditions is the emphasis on social justice, the prophetic dimension. Up until recently Buddhism hasn’t had a comparable emphasis on justice. Historically, the West has developed the possibility of more democratic, more just social arrangements – which should also become Buddhism’s concern, if our Bodhisattva vow implies alleviating institutionalized as well as individual dukkha “suffering.”

SZ: For many Westerners both Buddhism and psychology are perceived as elitist — for intellectuals. From the average Joe perspective I think that, for Buddhism to truly have an impact, it may sometimes need to be viewed through the scope of peoples’ own religious tradition. Some Buddhist tenets may need to be interpreted through certain passages in the Bible, for example.

DL: It will be interesting to see how that develops. I do not see how Buddhism is compatible with the traditional way most people see Christianity, for example, where Christ is the only Way and the Savior. But that’s not the only problematical element within the Abrahamic traditions, from a Buddhist perspective. The way that God is usually understood – an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving heavenly Father who tells us how to live – doesn’t really work anymore. Such a God doesn’t fit into our understanding of the universe and isn’t compatible with the sufferings experienced in the 20th century and continuing today. It’s not simply a matter of reinterpreting some biblical passages. Buddhism offers an alternative spiritual worldview. That’s likely to become a site of serious tension.

Each of the Abrahamic religions also has a mystical dimension that is much closer to Buddhism. Within Christianity there are people like Meister Eckhart and texts like The Cloud of Unknowing, and within Islam great mystic philosophers like Ibn al’ Arabi, whose understanding of God is more non-dualistic: a “theophanic” God takes form in us, as us, as everything. That is much closer to the Mahayana claim that form is emptiness, emptiness is form.

SZ: And those mystical dimensions all spring forth from contemplative traditions. The meditation component in Buddhism, therefore, I believe will be most helpful. In these Abrahamic religions prayer is often seen as petitionary — people asking for some thing — but, at least within the Christian tradition, there is also something called centering prayer. Prayer as open listening, which I think is quite similar to what we find in our meditation practices.

DL: Well said. Many of the Christians who came to practice with Yamada-roshi believed that the contemplative tradition within Christianity had largely been lost and they were there to recover it, without necessarily becoming Buddhists themselves.

SZ: In Sanskrit, karma literally means “action” while vipaka is the karmic result of that action. Even thoughts are said to produce karma, because they lead to actions. You have argued that this simple conception of karma as cause and effect leads to the tendency in many Buddhist traditions to view a person’s situation (usually negative) as the result of something they’ve done in the past. What, in your view, is a better way for Buddhists to view karmic cause-and-effect?

DL: Karma is one of the biggest areas of controversy in modern Buddhism, along with its corollary, rebirth. Shakyamuni Buddha grew up in a culture where belief in rebirth and karma was generally accepted. The question for us today is whether karma and rebirth, in the way that they came to be historically understood in Asia, are teachings essential to Buddhism. Many Western Buddhists, such as Robert Thurman, would say yes. Others, such as Stephen Batchelor and myself, understand karma and rebirth as issues that need to be rethought.

SZ: You’ve made a comparison between traditional Buddhist views on karma and the Christian notion of sin.

DL: I’m fascinated by the parallels. In the first few centuries after Jesus sin was understood in a more general way as alienation from God. Sin was separation from God and the fire of Hell was experiencing that separation. With the Papal Revolution in the eleventh century, sin became institutionalized into a very complex judicial system and God became more of a judge. This turned out to be very convenient for the Church, giving it more control over people. The other idea was that the Church inherited so much merit from the sacrifice of Jesus that could be distributed as it chose. For example, the Church could grant individuals relief from time in purgatory after they died.

Sin became objectified and commodified, something that could be dispensed according to the policies of the church. I’m referring to the indulgences that Luther railed against and that to a large extent led to the Reformation.

On the other side, when you look at the way Buddhism developed it is interesting how karma (which in the Pali Canon is presented in a more nuanced way) became objectified into a preoccupation with accumulating merit. It’s the mirror image of what happened in Christianity: merit is positive and sin is negative but both become something commodified. In both cases, this works to the benefit of the institution. It’s widely believed that how much merit you accumulate depends not only on your gift but also on the spiritual status of the recipient. Therefore, it is always better to give it to a monk or temple, because of course they must be more spiritually developed than some poor homeless person on the street who may actually need that food or money much more.

My book Money Sex War Karma has a chapter on“How to Drive Your Karma,” which presents an alternative perspective: karma is not something the self has but what the sense of self is. Just as the food that I eat is digested and becomes part of my physical body, so the intentional actions that I perform, as they become habituated, end up forming my character. That is why the Buddha emphasized intention so much – that was his revolutionary new perspective on karma, in place of old Brahminical emphasis on ritual and sacrifice. One way to understand how karma works is to see how habitualized intentions tend to create certain types of situations for us. Rather than seeing karma as something magical or transcendent, the habitual ways of acting and responding which form my sense of self involve consequences. If I am usually motivated by greed, ill will and delusion – the three poisons – I will tend to find myself in certain problematical situations.

Habitual ways of thinking and acting not only construct the sense of self, they also transform the world that we live in, in effect. We relate to the world in certain ways and the rest of the world tends to respond to us according to how we relate to it. Our karma isn’t something external or internal but the medium with which we approach the world.

SZ: I think what we’re seeing today is a struggle between fundamentalism and the ability to see the metaphor, you know?

DL: That reminds me of something Joseph Campbell wrote: “Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result, we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.”

What’s fact, what’s metaphor? I think that right now it’s important for modern Buddhists to be agnostic about doctrines like physical rebirth. What happens when we physically die? We may believe that something will happen but if we’re honest we don’t really know. It’s important to leave that issue open, to interrogate it, and not to say that because we’re Buddhists we must believe in karma and rebirth the way that they have been understood historically in Asia. We have to look at what modern science has discovered and what modern psychology has discovered and consider what that implies.

The question of karma brings us back to the issue of social justice. As I read the Pali Canon, the Buddha never meant for karma to justify the authority of kings and so forth. If you accept karma in a deterministic way, then the king in some sense deserves his power, and the impoverished and oppressed must deserve their conditions as well. I once heard a Buddhist teacher talk about the Nazi Holocaust during the second world war: “What horrible karma those Jewish people must have had.” We need to question that way of thinking.

SZ: Your view of rebirth is perhaps more analogous to the Phoenix Bird mythology, where the individual is transformed and reborn in this life itself (perhaps many times). To me, this is a more practical understanding of rebirth. That our actions, thoughts and feelings form how we interact with the world and, as a consequence, affect how the world views those interactions. We transform ourselves, through transcendence of the world of opposites, and are thus reborn.

DL: Whether or not we believe in the more traditional view, from a Zen perspective, at least, the most important rebirth is the one that happens every moment. The six realms are not necessarily places where we are reborn after we physically die but where we find ourselves moment by moment according to what is motivating us right now. “Transmigration” is happening all the time. There is a Zen story about a samurai who asks a master, “What is the difference between heaven and hell?” and the master replies, “What a stupid question. I will not waste my time answering something like that.” The samurai gets angry and begins to pull out his sword, whereupon the Zen master says, “That is the birth of hell.” He got the point and put his sword back in its sheath. The Zen master said, “That is the birth of heaven.”

SZ: The next few questions are from some fans of Sweeping Zen on Facebook. One person asks, “How do we make Buddhism work in our contemporary lives without diluting its history and customary forms of practice?”

DL: We’ve already touched on this. One issue today, which we did not discuss, is the “psychologization” of Buddhism. One can approach Buddhist teachings as self-help practices that help you deal with your personal problems, as ways to cope with stress that show us how to act when things seem to be falling apart. Yes, that’s an important function of the teachings but then there’s the danger that Buddhism will lose its critical edge, the emphasis on awakening.

The questioner asks about customary forms of practice and there is a balance to be maintained. That’s the challenge. Today we cannot simply accept that Asian Buddhism has worked it all out and that the task for us is simply to follow traditional practices. Asian Buddhism is the result of the ways various pre-modern, pre-scientific cultures developed spiritually. That should not determine its potentiality for us.

I have three main concerns. It’s essential to ask ourselves what within the Buddhist traditions is still alive today, what deserves to be adopted and developed, and what is cultural that we can let go – perhaps must be let go. If Buddhism is going to play the liberative role that we so much need now, with modernity in such a crisis, then we have to be able to distinguish what is fundamental about this tradition from all its previous cultural trappings. That’s one big concern.

Another major focus for me is socially engaged Buddhism. I spend a lot of time talking to Buddhists and Buddhist communities about the connection between personal practice and its social implications. It’s not enough to sit on our cushions and pursue our own individual development. That’s living out another version of the delusion of a separate self. We are all in this world together and the world needs Buddhists to participate as fully as possible in addressing the crises and the traumas that are happening. Money Sex War Karma works well as a workshop because it starts by discussing what I call the “sense of lack” that haunts the sense of a separate self. It looks at how Buddhist practice addresses that sense of lack and goes on to point out the connections between sense of lack and our preoccupation with things like money, fame, romantic love, and power – not only personal connections but the way those obsessions work collectively, because these are places where our society as a whole is stuck. We need to see how the three poisons have been institutionalized and how those institutions are incompatible with Buddhist teachings.

My third concern is how to bring Buddhist perspectives into the mainstream. What does a contemporary Buddhist worldview have to offer? Public debate about the role of religion in society usually assumes a Judeo-Christian framework. Then we end up with fundamentalists on one side, and on the other side militant atheists who reject all religion because an Abrahamic God is no longer believable. We need Buddhist public intellectuals to introduce alternative perspectives into such discussions.

SZ: From a reader: “Your thesis of Lack is premised on the notion that most people repress the feeling that deep down they fear groundlessness—or that the self might not feel real. But if you look at most Westerners, it appears that they don’t worry about whether they feel real or not. How can he make this generalization? Is it theory or an empirically based statement?”

DL: When I say that people feel unreal and are trying to make themselves more real, I don’t mean that’s what they are consciously doing. The basic point about lack is that it’s a way of understanding the dukkha that is so intrinsic to the sense of self, because the self is a psycho-social construct. That means the self isn’t real, in the sense that it has no being – no self-existence of its own. Such a construct is inevitably insecure and uncomfortable – that is, infected by dukkha. I think that’s the distinctive claim of Buddhism, the fundamental connection it emphasizes between the delusive sense of a separate self and dukkha.

Of course, this way of expressing it is not how we usually understand why we are so obsessed with things like money. But on an unconscious level I think that’s what’s going on. If it’s true that we have a sense of lack then in the process of growing up in the United States we are taught what our lack is and how to solve it: we need more money. That’s one example. Another is our preoccupation with fame. In this digital age, when we spend so much of our time communicating with each indirectly, either actively with Facebook or more passively absorbing media like television, there’s the sense that celebrities have some special status, that their fame makes them more real than the rest of us are. That’s why we’re so fascinated with them – wanting to be like them, or to bask in their aura.

If a sense of lack is the “other side” of self-consciousness, we can see that different cultures have historically dealt with this challenge in different ways. Isn’t coping with our sense of lack the main function of religion? If we were living in medieval Europe our sense of lack would be explained as sin, including original sin. What’s special about the contemporary West is that such religious explanations don’t work so well anymore, which means we seek more secular, individualistic solutions. But since we don’t really understand what’s going on, what’s actually motivating us, we tend to become addictive and obsessed, because money and fame (for example) never actually provide the sense of reality, of wholeness, that we seek from them.

SZ: The next question also comes from a reader. They ask, “How do we balance lack in our culture, which ironically drives sustenance in others? How can we minimize the effects of our craving on the world globally while still supporting ourselves adequately?”

DL: I think it’s important not to try to be completely pure in an impure world. We have to accept that we are implicated in a world of craving, delusion and exploitation and that we cannot completely escape our role in that. Right now as I sit here I’m benefiting from the labor of people who were probably paid a pittance for sewing my clothes. I’m certainly benefiting from the electricity produced by coal-fired power plants in Kentucky. Who grew the food I eat, who harvests it? Who profits from it? When I fly around to give lectures and workshops there are ecological consequences. The list goes on and on.

There are many individual things we can do. We can live more simply and reduce our carbon footprint. We can eat in ways that do not exploit animals and the earth so much. But, in addition to that, it’s important to understand and address the larger economic and social issues at play here, rather than focusing on our own purity or our own enlightenment. That just allows the rest of the world to go to hell more quickly. The fact is that we cannot ever separate ourselves from the larger pattern that we’re part of. The point is not to escape that pattern but to find ways to take responsibility for it – to respond to it.

SZ: David, this has been a fascinating interview. Thank you for this opportunity. In closing, are there any books you might recommend to readers who are interested in learning more about Zen or any of the issues we raised today in this interview?

DL: Well, for people who are interested in Zen practice but haven’t tried it yet, I suggest Robert Aitken’s Taking the Path of Zen. I also highly recommend Kapleau’sThe Three Pillars of Zen, although it emphasizes too much the drama of kensho.

Another book that is extremely valuable for younger people who are just coming to Buddhism is Ethan Nichtern’s One City. I used it as a text the last time I taught Buddhism as a university course and the students loved it. Ethan writes in a way that really speaks to younger people.

About Sweeping Zen

Established in 2009 as a grassroots initiative, Sweeping Zen is a digital archive of information on Zen Buddhism. Featuring in-depth interviews, an extensive database of biographies, news, articles, podcasts, teacher blogs, events, directories and more, this site is dedicated to offering the public a range of views in the sphere of Zen Buddhist thought. We are also endeavoring to continue creating lineage charts for all Western Zen lines, doing our own small part in advancing historical documentation on this fabulous import of an ancient tradition. Come on in with a tea or coffee. You're always bound to find something new.

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About Sweeping Zen

Established in 2009 as a grassroots initiative, Sweeping Zen is a digital archive of information on Zen Buddhism. Featuring in-depth interviews, an extensive database of biographies, news, articles, podcasts, teacher blogs, events, directories and more, this site is dedicated to offering the public a range of views in the sphere of Zen Buddhist thought. We are also endeavoring to continue creating lineage charts for all Western Zen lines, doing our own small part in advancing historical documentation on this fabulous import of an ancient tradition. Come on in with a tea or coffee. You're always bound to find something new.

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